Review of My Lovely Liar / 소용없어 거짓말

I have a confession to make: when I was watching Alchemy of Souls a hot minute ago, I lowkey was continuing to watch that show because I’d become obsessed with the fact that Hwang Min-hyun looks freakishly good in pastel hanbok.

When the final episodes were airing I was even raving about this fact to my coworkers, and they agreed with me despite knowing nothing about the drama.

Anyways, Alchemy of Souls convinced me to look up Hwang and I saw he was having a new drama come out in the summer, which I eagerly waited for.

I even bought a Viki subscription so I could binge watch the drama, as the summer of 2023 was a personal renaissance for me when it came to Korean dramas.

I hate romance movies and shows, but there’s something about Korean dramas that hit so well for me. It also is a bit of nostalgia, as I studied abroad in Korea in high school through a full government scholarship.

Let’s get into the review! I’ve rambled enough already.

A girl who can hear lies and a famous composer who might’ve murdered his ex fall in love.

My Lovely Liar begins with this series of events: Mok Sol-hee (Kim So-hyun) is hired by gangsters to snuff out someone who might’ve betrayed them, as she can literally hear lies, and the morning after she wakes up and realizes she needs to get out of town because the betrayer realized she screwed up his entire life here.

So she runs as he chases her, and she gets on a bus to the city. There, she sits next to a boy who is being chased by the older brother of his ex-girlfriend, and to get the bus going Mok Sol-hee lies about being with him and gets the guy off of the bus.

Years pass. Sol-hee starts her own business where she caters to wealthy clients, as she can still hear lies, so they know that if their lover, husbands, etc. is lying to them. For some reason, only romance or gangs seems to be the extent of her clientele.

The boy Sol-hee had met on the bus becomes Kim Do-ha (Hwang Min-hyun), a famous composer who works with the idol Sha On that’s wildly popular right now.

But there’s a catch: Kim Do-ha isn’t his real name. It’s Kim Seung-joo. The ex-girlfriend he was getting away from and going to school away from vanished one night after Seung-joo was talking to her, and it’s widely believed that he killed her because of a testimony he gave.

Now he lives his life with a mask on, given the opportunity to compose by a high school friend that runs an entertainment company.

When Seung-joo and Sol-hee’s paths cross and he has to move into the apartment next to hers, they strike up a friendship of sorts that starts with their overeager love of soccer.

As the boundaries move beyond friendship to romantic interest, Sol-hee learns about Seung-joo’s hidden past and learns to go beyond the gift she relied on after all of these years.

At the same time, the show embarks on some pretty weird twists—one of the big ones literally had me doing a double take when it came up.

So this is a show that will certainly keep on your toes until the end! It’s cute though, that’s what I will say overall. I think there are some important messages that sometimes everything isn’t what it seems on the surface, even if you can hear lies.

Overall Thoughts

I think My Lovely Liar starts off really strong.

Although the male lead is pretty stoic in the beginning as he refuses to take his mask off, this is a pretty nuanced drama as both characters really evolve over the course of the show.

The mystery elements begin to consume the plot by around episode ten, and that’s around the time when I began to get lost in the plot and concepts they were introducing this late in the game.

If the second half of the show had been a lot neater, this would have been one of my favorite Korean dramas. But I’m glad I watched it though!

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